Stacy McCain touches upon an idea I had last night but hadn't really developed. He's talking about the Left's promise to fix everything (by placing it under state control):

The answer to this kind of Pixie Dust nonsense is not for Republicans to try to steal the Pixie Dust formula, offering their own magical policy panaceas. Rather, the GOP needs to speak the brutal truth: there are no pixies and no magic.

There are no panaceas. We can neither return to some mythical edenic Golden Age nor are we marching toward some future Utopia of perfection. Decades of trying to vote ourselves into Heaven-on-Earth have created the very problems -- e.g., the actuarial nightmares of Social Security and Medicare -- which today's promise-'em-anything Democrats claim they'll fix.

"Grow Up, America" would be an accurate slogan for what the nation really needs. It wouldn't be a popular message, but it would be a true assessment of what ails us: a childishness, a politics of wishing, of which the naivete of Peggy Jones was but an extreme example.

The problem with most Republicans is that they are trying to offer the same things as the Democrats, only slightly more restricted, responsible, and less overreaching. Republicans tend to run about a generation behind the Democrats on policy. Moldbug points this out nicely:

Consider the difference between the Procedure and the democratic strategy of conservatism. Conservatism seeks to either halt the decay of USG where it is, or return USG to some ideal state of the past - restoring, for instance, the Constitution of 1789. Or at least the Constitution of 1932. Or maybe just the Reagan Administration.
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Ie: it may be obvious to anyone who takes a clear look at the matter that America was better governed in 1909 than 2009. But this study produces neither any consensus on what year is preferred, for what issue, or how to translate that year's form of government into 2009. There is no little blue manual for going back to governing America like it was really America. This would be your conservative Schelling point, if it existed, which it does not and never will.

The current strategy of 'vote conservatives into Washington' is doomed to failure. Elected and appointed officials make up only a small part of the USG power structure. You'd also have to replace the civil service with conservatives (or more likely throw most of the civil service out and not replace it at all), as well as replacing the academia which teaches people to be liberal.

As McCain says, people need to grow up and stop relying on mommy government to take care of them. Christians should be ideally suited to teaching people to grow up. We have Truth on our side. We know life is not and never will be fair. We know some people are evil and some people are good. The goal should not be to take back government, but to teach people Truth.

Several interesting questions come out of this. How do we teach people truth, especially given the opposition of our current education system? What would happen if Christians withdrew from politics, the let the liberals run the state unfettered? Would even be allowed to teach at that point? What would happen to people's faith in the state if liberals ran everything? What would it take, and how long would it take, for enough people to realize the true effects of liberalism?

I think these are important questions that need answers. America has been shifting leftward for generations. It is a decline that will eventually lead to collapse, and our current strategy is not working. It has only slowed it, not reversed, or even stopped it. But to find a solution, I'm going to have to go beyond sounding off in the empty little bubble that is my blog. I need some help.